The Hunt For The Worst Movie Of All Time: Running With Scissors

Augusten Burroughs’s memoirs and books of essays are really popular. Probably. Right? I think that’s true. People buy them and they are best-sellers, and then they get turned into movies, or whatever. So, congratulations to him. I have never read any of his books, although I tried one time. I read the first essay of one of his books (not Running with Scissors) and I found the whole thing so phony that I threw the book out the window. That’s not true! I simply stopped reading it, and probably placed the book back on the bookshelf. But saying that you got so fed up with a book that you threw it out the window is exactly the kind of phoniness that I found throughout his writing, in the one short thing I read. People don’t really throw books out of windows when they’re fed up with them, they just put them away. I did throw a garbage can out a window one time, but that’s because it had a live bat in it and I was scared and it’s a whole other story anyway. Augusten Burroughs got famous on the David Sedaris wave of not really very funny at all people who threw bad jokes into over-exaggerated stories about their childhood and read them on NPR a lot. Remember that wave? It took place from, like, 1994 until yesterday, and it was terrible. At least David Sedaris was genuinely funny (before he started writing thin allegories about, like, turtles smoking cigarettes or whatever he does now). The whole memoir thing seemed to kind of track with the whole reality TV thing, as if our garbage television necessitated that we now read garbage books. This ended with the James Frey implosion, which is not to say that memoirs are not still big business, or that people are not still reading terrible books, but, you know, A Million Little Pieces are our generation’s literary 9/11. (GOOD ANALOGY.) The point is: I wasn’t a fan of Augusten Burroughs BEFORE seeing this movie, and this movie sure didn’t change that.

Running with Scissors is based on the Augusten Burroughs memoir of the same name, and is about a young man named, wait for it, Augusten Burroughs, coming of age in the late 1970s. His mom (Annette Bening) is a delusional, narcissistic, would-be poet and his dad is Alec Baldwin.

Annette Bening and Alec Baldwin fight all the time, which is hard for young Augusten, because he just wants to be a hairdresser. One night (really? night?) a doctor (Brian Cox) comes to the house to examine Augusten’s mother. He starts giving her valium. Sure. Then he basically, like, forces her and Alec Baldwin to get a divorce. Oh, he is a real character, by the way. Then he makes Augusten’s mom move into a motel. Meanwhile, Augusten is forced to move into his weird house with his weird family. Eventually, the doctor legally adopts him, and Augusten’s mom becomes a lesbian, and Augusten is gay now with a guy with a handlebar moustache, and he also fakes his own suicide to drop out of high school on the doctor’s recommendation. The movie ends with him saying goodbye to his mess of a mom, and the weird, down-trodden, dog-food-eating wife of the doctor giving him a tin can full of money and him getting on a bus to New York City to become a writer. Fine.

Let’s back up a second.

The story of a young man being abandoned by his mother into the mildly eccentric family of a psychiatrist right as he is coming into his own is an interesting story! It makes sense that Augusten Burroughs would write a memoir about something like that and that it would be successful. It follows that Hollywood would then adapt that memoir into a movie. Got it. We’re all on the same page here. The problem is that the story is so intense and outlandish on its own, that all of the “quirky” embellishments come off as patently false and very annoying. Like, when the doctor first comes over to the house, Annette Bening asks him if she can get him anything, coffee or tea? He says “I would like some cold bologna slices with a side of horseradish.”

Look, I’m sorry, I know that people come in all shapes and sizes and that real life is crazier than any fiction we could ever come up with, but you’re not going to convince me that a doctor came over to a house in the middle of the night no less and when confronted with the offer of coffee or tea he said that he wanted “cold bologna slices with a side of horseradish.” BOLOGNA IS RIGHT! That NEVER HAPPENED. Even if it happened, it never happened, if you catch my meaning. Like, sometimes there are things that happen in this life that don’t actually make for good stories because they are too weird and unlikely. But also that didn’t actually happen. Come on. (It is worth noting that I watched very carefully during the following scene to see if he actually ate the cold bologna slices with a side of horseradish–which she of course just had and gave to him no questions asked?–and he did not touch them. I HATE IT.)

The rest of the movie is more of the same: one “weird” moment to the next, constantly testing your willful suspension of disbelief, which happens in lots of movies, but is particularly weird for a movie that is supposedly based on real life. The story itself is believable enough: sure, it’s not every day that a son is unceremoniously passed off on an eccentric family because the mother is too drugged up and self-obsessed to care, but I can certainly believe that has happened at least this once. It’s all the other details that ring false. They’re constantly throwing the book out the window when they could simply stop reading it and place it on the shelf.

Most of the “movie” parts of the movie are fine! All of the acting is pretty decent, even Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays the older, eccentric daughter of the eccentric doctor. The tone and pacing and cinematography are all done in the completely unoriginal but compelling enough style of post-Wes Anderson, post-Spike Jonze, post-Guy Ritchie cinema. Plenty of decently constructed “indie-quirk” moments. The movie was directed by Ryan Murphy, who created Glee and who also directed Eat, Pray, Love. This guy really needs a Source Material Choosing Coach to teach him how to choose better source material! Although, there is the pre-requisite movie that discusses mental health in any way screaming scene:

And overstuffed medicine cabinet scene:

But, the movie’s fundamental problems come from, one must assume, Augusten Burroughs himself. It’s worth noting that after the book came out, he was sued by the family for defamation. They settled out of court, and the book was recategorized from a memoir to a “book.” (Haha. “A book.”) The thing is, even in the movie’s depiction of a Hoarders house full of lunatics, it is still quite clear that people in the fictionalized version of the family genuinely cared about Augusten. You will remember that the movie ends with the other mom, who did more for him as a mother than his real mother did, giving him her life savings so that he could pursue his dream. The family accepted and encouraged his homosexuality, the children took him in as a brother, every indulgence and allowance was made. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t still feel some sort of alienation from a family that was not his own, but to turn around and describe them all as such intense weirdos and creeps certainly suggests a lack of appreciation and basic respect. Kind of a dick move! There’s also the part where Augusten Burroughs changed his name to Augusten Burroughs (nee Christopher Robison), which is not included in the movie, but is the type of thing where if someone is so intense about self-creation and the rewriting of the past as to legally change their name, who knows where the line between truth and fiction lies. (In the movie, his mom’s name is Deirdre, but in real life his mom’s name is Margaret. Why? What is this, then?)

In the Wikipedia description of the memoir, which again, I fully admit to not having read, there is stuff about the doctor maybe raping Augusten’s mother, and also the suggestion which is only loosely alluded to in the movie of Augusten being molested and forced into a sexual relationship before he’s ready. These are very dark and intense revelations/accusations/whatever you want to call them. The fact that they were mostly scrubbed from the movie in order to make the movie more appealing to a general audience makes you kind of wonder what the point of the movie is in the first place. If a memoir is a loose remembering and subjective reinterpretation of actual events, then what is a sanitized and fictionalized movie adaptation of that memoir? I will tell you: A MESS.

Next week: Spread. As always, please leave your suggestions in the comments or in an email. And if you haven’t done so already, please consult the Official Rules.

Seventeen bottles of pills is too many bottles of pills. I can’t even name seventeen different things that could be wrong with a person, let alone believe that a doctor would prescribe more pills once they found out the person was on, like, seven.

“You’re already on seven kinds of medication? Do you have any serious illness? No? Go fuck yourself.” – Me, if I was a doctor.

I always wonder how much of a memoir is fiction or not. Are they considered half-fiction? Because I’ve found the recent popular trend of memoirs as lazy half-fiction. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t good ones (there are great ones!), but that a lot of them come off as just stories the people have repeated ad nauseum and assume people like when really they’re like “Ugh, this one again Janus? Shut it. Please. No one cares about high school, that was years ago.” Then they wrote them down.

Or something. I don’t know where this is going. I’m going back to reading Infinite Jest.

My mom got all excited about the “sequel” to the “memoir”/book(OF LIES) that was written by Augustus’ mother. “It’s the rebuttal! It’s her side of the story!” “But wasn’t she basically crazy and a wholly terrible person, period? Why would I want to read her ‘side’ of what basically amounted to child abuse?” “…Well, your aunt said she heard about it on Oprah. You should read it.”

It was super uncomfortable taking a friend to see this movie because I remembered actually liking to the book. First rule of adaptation: some things seem less alarming in writing than they do when actually acted out by people. For example, poop stuff. Now I know!

Your link to David Edelstein’s review of the Funny Games remake made me think how great it would be to have Gabe review a Michael Haneke movie. I personally like most of Haneke’s work, but it is very controversial and usually generates some great discussions.

Therefore, I would like to nominate the Funny Games remake (2007 with Naomi Watts and Michael Pitt) as I believe it is the only one of Haneke’s movies that would qualify based on the Hunt rules.

I feel personally satisfied because I steadfastly kept suggesting this movie every time their were nominations.

The book, although far from perfect, did include some emotion and character narrative that seemed genuine. The movie just seemed to be a parade of the bizarre moments like “LOOK! ANOTHER CRAZY SCENE! ISN’T THIS STORY CRAZY?” to the point where it actually became boring. Like, at the end, Gwyneth paltrow’s character cooked the pet catfor dinner, and by then the viewer didn’t even give a shit.

And the whole thing about his relationship with the older man? Um, rape much? It wasn’t presented as an actual, life-altering experience, but yet another WEIRD SCENE.* The most infuriating part was, at the end, for the “what happened to the characters” part, Augusten Burroughs, the author himself, appears alonside the Augusten actor. Like, he couldn’t stand NOT being in the movie.

Also: fuck Ryan Murphy.

*Joseph Fiennes, despite being a fantastic actor, seems to choose the shittiest projects ever. it went downhill since Shakespeare in Love. Enemy at the Gates, The Darwin Awards, that soft-core with Heather Graham, The Very Thought of You…

I haven’t seen the movie, but I did read the book. So Bizzarro Gabe, essentially.

Anyways, I have to take issue with something Gabe said here. He suggested that throwing the book out the window would be somehow inappropriate. This is false. If anything, flying out the window and out into the street below is too good a fate for that piece of pretentious, phony trash.

I read the book in high school, and I liked it because I thought it made me cool and edgy. “Masturbating with poop? No big deal. You can’t shock me!” High school, right! I’m sure I’d hate it now, though.

I didn’t like the movie when I saw it several years later, but I did buy the soundtrack immediately afterwards. Good soundtrack.

I think all these semi-fictionalized memoirs like this come from how people say, “You know how truth is stranger than fiction?” Which, duh, no it’s not.

TRUTH: Winston Churchill’s mom had a tattoo on her wrist that she covered up with a snake bracelet.

FICTION: Winston Churchill’s mom was a space vampire.

Truth is only strange because it’s true. So, when you call your book a memoir, it completely lowers our threshold for strangeness. When the doctor comes in and wants cold bologna with horseradish, that’s pretty crazy, but only if he really did it. If this were fiction, you’d say, “What? Dumb. This is fiction, son, you’ll have to do better than that! ‘I’d like horseradish with some cold slices of SPACE VAMPIRE.”

Calling your weird, lightly-autobiographical and kind of quirky novel a “memoir” is just an excuse to put random, kind of weird things into it and everyone will love it because 1) the pretense that this REALLY HAPPENED makes them seem strange, and not like some dumb thing you made up, and 2) the pretense that this REALLY HAPPENED means that they don’t have to be connected or meaningful or proceed logically from anything else in the story, because life is a confusing and complicated mess and sometimes weird things happen.

In summation: “memoir” means “I thought of some weird things that I can’t fit anywhere else, pretend that they happened to me and that will make them interesting.”

Oh Gosh, I don’t have time to read this because I have work to do and time doesn’t grow on money or whatever, but I just wanted to say SCREW THIS MOVIE and KUDOS to you, Hard Gabe, for zinging this dumb crappy movie that I hated whilst my friends liked it. Ugh. I hate that I saw this movie.

I’d like to nominate the religious action thriller Legion for Worst Movie of All Time. I hope one of the requirements of the search isn’t that the movie has to be painful to watch because it was an absolute JOY, let me tell you. But still, this movie only barely qualifies as a movie because it is so absurd and ridiculous and all those words that mean those exact words in a derogatory sense. I love Paul Bettany, and as a Paul Bettany fan one must also love terrible films wherein he plays some sort of religious figure who is also an action hero out to kick some demon/vampire/atheist ass, but even I had to draw the line somewhere- and that line was drawn at Legion. It went from being okay bad, like The Rite bad, or Priest bad, to cult film bad within the first 5 minutes and it was still all downhill from there. Please review!

I haven’t seen this movie, read the book though. And, based on this article, they changed a bunch of stuff. Which I hate. Like, I thought the ending was that he left or ran away or whatever, and he was a waiter, saved some money, then went to New York to go into advertisement. I know his job was advertisement in Dry, which was maybe more believable than Running with Scissors. I don’t know. I have bad memory, and I’m too lazy to pick up Running with Scissors… Good thing I got both books free.

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